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Scroll for updates…7:39am Eastern press conference…Ft. Hood officials disclose that the murder victims included 12 soldiers and 1 civilian…first responder heroine who shot Hasan is in stable condition…witnesses still being interviewed “all through the night”…they confirm that Hasan was wearing his uniform…

I was traveling to Wichita for a speaking event/fundraiser (which I’ll tell you more about later) when news of the Fort Hood massacre broke. Please continue to pray for the 12 murder victims [update 11/6: now 13 dead] and their families, and the 30 wounded and their families.

Terry Lee, a retired Army colonel who knew Hasan, told Fox News about a story he heard secondhand. He said a fellow colleague had told him that Hasan had made “outlandish comments” about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and US involvement in them and that “Muslims had a right to rise up and attack Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“[He] made comments about how we shouldn’t be over there – you need to lock it up, Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor,” Lee added.

But the suspect’s cousin, Nader Hasan, gave Fox News a different picture. He said his cousin had never deployed but was affected by the war and had been concerned about his impending deployment.

“He would tell us how he would hear things, horrific things, things from war probably affecting him psychologically,” Nader Hasan said.

His name appears on radical Internet postings. A fellow officer says he fought his deployment to Iraq and argued with soldiers who supported U.S. wars. He required counseling as a medical student because of problems with patients.

There are many unknowns about Nidal Malik Hasan, the man authorities say is responsible for the worst mass killing on a U.S. military base. Most of all, his motive. But details of his life and mindset, emerging from official sources and personal acquaintances, are troubling.

“Troubling.” And familiar.

At least six months ago, Hasan came to the attention of law enforcement officials because of Internet postings about suicide bombings and other threats, including posts that equated suicide bombers to soldiers who throw themselves on a grenade to save the lives of their comrades.

There was a grenade thrown amongs a group of American soldiers. One of the soldiers, feeling that it was to late for everyone to flee jumped on the grave with the intention of saving his comrades. Indeed he saved them. He inentionally took his life (suicide) for a noble cause i.e. saving the lives of his soldier. To say that this soldier committed suicide is inappropriate. Its more appropriate to say he is a brave hero that sacrificed his life for a more noble cause. Scholars have paralled this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers. If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory. Their intention is not to die because of some despair. The same can be said for the Kamikazees in Japan. They died (via crashing their planes into ships) to kill the enemies for the homeland. You can call them crazy i you want but their act was not one of suicide that is despised by Islam. So the scholars main point is that “IT SEEMS AS THOUGH YOUR INTENTION IS THE MAIN ISSUE” and Allah (SWT) knows best.

Those of you with long memories will remember all those who came before Hasan. Here is my column from March 2003 on Muslim soldiers with attitude:

Sgt. Asan Akbar, a Muslim American soldier with the 326th Engineer Battalion, had an “attitude problem.”

According to his superiors and acquaintances, Akbar’s attitude was bitterly anti-American and staunchly pro-Muslim. So how did this devout follower of the so-called Religion of Peace work out his attitudinal problems last weekend?

By lobbing hand grenades and aiming his M-4 automatic rifle into three tents filled with sleeping commanding officers at the 101st Airborne Division’s 1st Brigade operations center in Kuwait.

Akbar is the lone suspect being detained in the despicable attack, which left more than a dozen wounded and one dead. Surviving soldiers say Akbar, found cowering in a bunker with shrapnel injuries, was overheard ranting after the assault: “You guys are coming into our countries, and you’re going to rape our women and kill our children.”

“Our”? At least there’s no doubt about where this Religion of Peace practitioner’s true loyalties lie.

Naturally, apologists for Islam-gone-awry are hard at work dismissing this traitorous act of murder as an “isolated, individual act and not an expression of faith.” But such sentiments are willfully blind and recklessly p.c.

Sgt. Akbar is not the only MSWA — Muslim soldier with attitude — suspected of infiltrating our military, endangering our troops and undermining national security:

— Ali A. Mohamed. Mohamed, a major in the Egyptian army, immigrated to the U.S. in 1986 and joined the U.S. Army while a resident alien. This despite being on a State Department terrorist watch list before securing his visa. An avowed Islamist, he taught classes on Muslim culture to U.S. Special Forces at Fort Bragg, N.C., and obtained classified military documents. He was granted U.S. citizenship over the objections of the CIA.

A former classmate, Jason T. Fogg, recalled that Mohamed was openly critical of the American military. “To be in the U.S. military and have so much hate toward the U.S. was odd. He never referred to America as his country.”

Soon after he was honorably discharged from the Army in 1989, Mohamed hooked up with Osama bin Laden as an escort, trainer, bagman and messenger. Mohamed used his U.S. passport to conduct surveillance at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi; he later pled guilty to conspiring with bin Laden to “attack any Western target in the Middle East” and admitted his role in the 1998 African embassy bombings that killed more than 200 people, including a dozen Americans.

Ain’t multiculturalism grand?

— Semi Osman. An ethnic Lebanese born in Sierra Leone and a Seattle-based Muslim cleric, Osman served in a naval reserve fueling unit based in Tacoma, Wash. He had access to fuel trucks similar to the type used by al Qaeda in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers, which killed 19 U.S. airmen and wounded nearly 400 other Americans.

Osman was arrested last May as part of a federal investigation into the establishment of a terrorist training camp in Bly, Oregon. Osman recently pleaded guilty to a weapons violation, and the feds dropped immigration charges against him in exchange for his testimony.

Ain’t open borders grand?

— John Muhammad. The accused Beltway sniper and Muslim convert was a member of the Army’s 84th Engineering Company. In an eerie parallel to the Akbar case, Muhammad is suspected of throwing a thermite grenade into a tent housing 16 of his fellow soldiers as they slept before the ground-attack phase of Gulf War I in 1991. Muhammad’s superior, Sgt. Kip Berentson, told both Newsweek and The Seattle Times that he immediately suspected Muhammad, who was “trouble from day one.”

Curiously, Muhammad was admitted to the Army despite being earlier court-martialed for willfully disobeying orders, striking another noncommissioned officer, wrongfully taking property, and being absent without leave while serving in the Louisiana National Guard.

Although Muhammad was led away in handcuffs and transferred to another company pending charges for the grenade attack, an indictment never materialized. Muhammad was honorably discharged from the Army in 1994. Eight years later, he was arrested in the 21-day Beltway shooting spree that left 10 dead and three wounded.

Ain’t tolerance grand?

— Jeffrey Leon Battle. A former Army reservist, Battle was indicted in October 2002 for conspiring to levy war against the United States and “enlisting in the Reserves to receive military training to use against America.” According to the Justice Department, he planned to wage war against American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Ain’t diversity grand?

“It’s bad enough we have to worry about enemy forces, but now we have to worry about our own guys,” Spc. Autumn Simmer told the Los Angeles Times this week after the assault on the 101st Airborne. The Islamist infiltration of our troops is scandalous. Not one more American, soldier or civilian, must be sacrificed at the altar of multiculturalism, diversity, open borders, and tolerance of the murderous “attitude” of Jihad.

FYI: Convicted Beltway sniper John Muhammad is scheduled to be executed next week. No doubt the families of the Muslim sniper victims are re-living the horror tonight.

FYI: Muslim US soldier Hasan Abujihaad was convicted last year on espionage and material terrorism support charges
after serving aboard the USS Benfold and sharing classified info with al Qaeda financiers, including movements of US ships just six months after al Qaeda operatives had killed 17 Americans aboard the USS Cole in the port of Yemen.

Clarice Feldman notes President Obama’s “odd” — to say the least — reaction to the attack on Fort Hood soldiers:

On Thursday, 11 soldiers and civilian police at Fort Hood were slaughtered execution-style at close range and over 30 others wounded, allegedly by a U.S. Army Major Malik Nadal Hasan. The President immediately addressed the nation concerning this horrific event.

However, his expression of grief was very odd. He spent the first two minutes of the four-and-a-half minute address in a light-hearted discussion of his earlier “Tribal Nations Conference” on Native American rights, including a “shout out” recognition of a conference attendee.

When he finally got around to the purpose for his public appearance, he gave an uninspired and rambling dissertation on the tragedy. Even then, he could not keep the topic focused on sympathy for the pain of others:
I want all of you to know that as Commander in Chief, that there’s no greater honor, but no greater responsibility for me (emphasis his) than to make sure that the extraordinary men and women in uniform are properly cared for…

Poor soul, it’s so saddening to know how this tragedy affects him. Listening to this address provides some insight into Obama’s character and how he ranks his priorities.

***

Business as usual: The whitewashing of jihad by the MSM. See here and here.

U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, a Republican from Austin, was briefed by military officials and said Hasan had taken some unusual classes for someone studying about mental health.

“He took a lot of extra classes in weapons training, which seems a little odd for a psychiatrist,” McCaul said.

McCaul said Hasan had received poor grades for his work at Walter Reed and was not happy about his situation in Fort Hood, where Hasan apparently felt like “he didn’t fit in.”

“He’s disgruntled because he had a poor performance evaluation, he doesn’t believe in the mission, he’s looking at getting transferred to Afghanistan or Iraq,” McCaul said. “He’s not happy about all that.”

McCaul added that officials planned to interview Hasan to try to determine for sure that he was not working with foreign agents.

“From an intelligence standpoint, that’s key, finding out if he talked to anyone overseas,” McCaul said.

CNN (ditto the New York Times website) was considerably less useful than the tidbits I picked up online by following links on various blogs and in Facebook postings. They led me to (among other things) an AP story, a Daily Mail article, and a Fox News interview that provided telling details: Hasan had apparently been a devout Muslim; Arabic words, reportedly a Muslim prayer, had been posted on his apartment door in Maryland; in conversations with colleagues he had repeatedly expressed sympathy for suicide bombers; on Thursday morning, hours before the massacre, he had supposedly handed out copies of the Koran to neighbors. A couple of these facts eventually surfaced on CNN, but only briefly; they were rushed past, left untouched, unexamined; the network seemed to be making a masterly effort to avoid giving this data a cold, hard look. Meanwhile it spent time doing heavy-handed spin — devoting several minutes, for example, to an inane interview with a forensic psychiatrist who talked about the stress of treating soldiers bearing the emotional scars of war. The obvious purpose was to turn our eyes away from Islamism and toward psychiatric instability as a motive.

…after [the Anderson Cooper show] was over, we got a “special edition” of Larry King Live hosted by Wolf Blitzer. This one really took the cake. By way of “illuminating” Hasan’s actions, Blitzer interviewed a panel of — no, not experts on Islamic jihad, but psychiatrists. Blitzer endlessly repeated the mantra that Hasan had been “taunted” for being Muslim, had feared going to a war zone, and had ultimately gone “berserk,” and the docs echoed this line. “He did not reach for help when he should have,” lamented one panelist. Another opined: “It sounded like it got to be too much for him.” Yet another told us: “All kind of people need help who aren’t getting help. … He was feeling picked on by his colleagues. … He was strained. He was scared.”

Could there be a more bitter contrast? At Fort Hood, so many courageous GIs, all of them prepared to risk their lives fighting the Islamic jihadist enemy in defense of our freedom, several of them now dead. And, on our TV screens, so many apparently craven journalists, public officials, psychiatrists, and (alas) even military brass — all but a few of whom seemed unwilling to do anything more than hint obliquely at the truth that obviously lies at the root of this monstrous act.